Tag Archives: commuter rail

Poor transit planning: an example that proves the rule

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One of the most infuriating things about transit planning is when an agency does something which is designed to cause delays and for which there is an obvious solution. Customers have some understanding about things that are beyond the railroad’s direct control: trespassing, downed trees, even (to an extent) equipment, track or signal failures (although these are more preventable). But when your bus or train takes longer than necessary because of a stupid decision by the transit operator, it is far more maddening. These would include things like fare policy (the front-door boarding on the Green Line, which causes completely unnecessary delays for passengers). But that comes in relatively small doses, and it’s hard to compute.

A far more concrete example is what happens late every morning on the Haverhill Line. Starting this week, all midday service between Haverhill and Boston has been sent via the Lowell Line to allow for track work on the southern section of the line. What the T did is to take all of the scheduled Haverhill trains and run them express via the Wildcat between Ballardvale and North Station. They maintain their original arrival times, but by running express via faster trackage should arrive at North Station 15 minutes early, so the arrival time is schedule padding. Except in the case of one train, 210, which will arrive late every day, because of a scheduled conflicting move.
210 leaves Haverhill at 9:05 and is scheduled in to Ballardvale at 9:29 before its express trip to Boston. Amtrak’s first northbound Downeaster leaves Boston at 9:05, Woburn at 9:23 and Haverhill at 9:53. During normal operations, this works fine: 210 clears Wilmington Junction staying on the Western Route (the track towards North Wilmington) around 9:30, and Amtrak approaches northbound on the Wildcat a few minutes later. With the schedule change, however, Amtrak takes precedence on the extended single track, from Wilmington all the way past Andover, a distance of 8 miles (there is a double-track project in the area which will mitigate this issue; it is proceeding at a decidedly glacial pace). So the commuter train has to sit there for 15 to 20 minutes waiting for Amtrak to pass. Every single day.
But there’s an easy fix to this: the commuter train could leave Haverhill 15 minutes later. There are no schedule conflicts, no track conflicts: the train runs 15 minutes later, approaches the single track at Andover just as the northbound Downeaster gets on to the double track, and proceeds in to Boston. Everyone on the train has a ride that’s 15 minutes shorter. Everyone is happy.
I’m sure the argument against this would be something like “people are used to the train showing up at a certain time and we don’t want to change the schedule on them.” This is why you have a schedule change. The train would be moved later. A few people who don’t pay any attention will wind up waiting 15 minutes at their station the first day. Some of them might consult a schedule posted there and realize that the schedule was changed, and not come 15 minutes later the next day. No one will miss the train, only a few people would have a longer wait. Which they are going to have anyway, because nine days out of ten the train is going to be held for conflicting traffic (unless the Downeaster is delayed significantly, and it’s been running on schedule more frequently recently).
Plus, the current delays will lull passengers at Andover and Ballardvale in to thinking the train will always be 15 to 20 minutes late, so they’ll start showing up then anyway (Pavlov’s dog, etc). Then, on the one day that the track is open and the train operates on schedule, people will be left behind (at least 212 operates rather shortly thereafter). So by not changing the schedule to reflect reality, the following occurs:
  • All passengers from Lawrence north have a 15 to 20 minute on-train delay every day north of Andover.
  • All passengers at Andover and Ballardvale have a 15 to 20 minute on-platform delay.
  • On the occasion that the train operates on schedule, any passengers who decide to come at the actual usual arrival time at Andover and Ballardvale run the risk of missing the train, although they may decide that the 15 minutes saved most days make up for the 40 minute delay once a week.
Pushing the departures back 15 minutes would solve all of these problems, and give passengers a very fast trip in to Boston express from Ballardvale. So why doesn’t this happen? Perhaps institutional inertia. Perhaps incompetence. Maybe the T doesn’t even want people to get used to a faster trip when the trains are shifted back to the local schedule in a few months. But it’s a sad state of affairs when the T and Keolis decide that a 20 minute delay is acceptable—every day—and the passengers are the ones who pay. 
And then they wonder why the passengers lose all faith in the transit providers. This is why.

How the North South Rail Link could work

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North South Rail Link schematic showing current train volumes for Commuter Rail
lines, potential future RER-style connections and new and existing stations.

Discussion about the North South Rail Link has bubbled up again, with Mike Dukakis and Bill Weld writing in the Globe about how it should be a priority, Commonwealth magazine calling them out on where the money would come from, and Dukakis replying that if you wanted to find the money, you certainly could. A thread started on Universal Hub with a lot of people wondering how the rail link would function. Here are my thoughts/explanations.

Efficiency. The crux of the issue is that MassDOT wants/needs more space at South Station (and eventually North Station) and is limited by the number of tracks. Turning trains around is time-consuming: you have to unboard (deboard?) the train, board the train (even at rush hour, 50-100 or more reverse commuters may be waiting), have the crew change ends, and then thread out the same slow trackage you came in. Even with the best of practices, a terminal station track can only accommodate a train every 15 minutes or so. But if trains run through, boarding and alighting is faster and easier, there’s no need for the crew to change ends, and with more destinations,  fewer passengers get off at each stop. You could route 20 trains per hour per track, meaning that four tracks in the rail link could do the work of 20 at South Station (currently there are 13; the expansion would add about a half dozen more).

Electrification. You need to electrify the whole system (and maybe Amtrak to Portland). Maybe you could get away with dual mode engines, but that’s lipstick on a pig. Electrification of the Commuter Rail network would cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $1 to $2 billion dollars. Not cheap. But huge operational efficiencies: electric trains are cheaper to run, cheaper to maintain, and have faster acceleration meaning that trip times (and staff costs) are shorter, while ridership is higher (faster trains = higher ridership).

North/South imbalance and the Grand Junction. The idea behind the North South Rail Link is that trains coming in to South Station run through the tunnel and out one of the North Side lines. This is the Philadelphia model. This works well in theory (some passengers would get a one-seat ride; others would have to change), but in practice more trains run in to South Station than North Station (although this was not always the case; in 1972 there were twice as many passengers at North Station). Several pair off relatively well:

Needham-Haverhill
Providence/Stoughton-Lowell
Franklin-Fitchburg
Old Colony Lines-Eastern Route

But falls apart when you realize that all the North Side routes are taken and you haven’t accounted for the Worcester or Fairmount Lines. You could route them through to other terminals, say, to Anderson Woburn, but this seems wasteful; you don’t need a train every 8 minutes inbound from Woburn. This is where the Grand Junction comes in. If it were grade-separated in Cambridge (or maybe even if not; there are grade crossings in downtown Chicago with 20 trains per hour at peak times), Worcester Trains could split off at West Station (hopefully) and make a loop (much like lines in Melbourne, where a similar imbalance existed), serving Yawkey, Back Bay, Downtown and Kendall. As for the Fairmount Line …

Potential for RER(/S-bahn/Crosslink)-style service. Having the rail link in place with the Grand Junction connection would not only allow you to route trains through the city, but it would also allow you to implement RER-type service filling much of the urban ring and providing more frequent service than Commuter Rail (although Commuter Rail could run more frequently as well). If all the paired lines shared one set of tunnels, the Worcester Line could share the other with the following RER-type services:

Allston to Assembly via Cambridge (Kendall) and Sullivan
Readville to Allston via Downtown and Cambridge (Kendall)
Allston to Chelsea via Downtown and Sullivan

These would operate frequently all day, every 10 to 15 minutes, allowing transfers between subway and Commuter Rail. This leverages the capacity of the rail link to create a complementary urban rail network to provide new connections and take some pressure off the existing hub-and-spoke network.

Get rid of North Station. Most ideas about the Rail Link include three downtown stations. But you only need two. Where North Station is today is convenient to very little, and the half mile to its north is taken up by highway ramps and water. A better idea would be a station between Aquarium and Haymarket. It still allows for transfers to all subway lines, and there is very little that is less than a 10 minute walk from North Station but more than a 10 minute walk from Haymarket. It would save money, too. (Obviously, the existing Green/Orange line station would remain.)

Open new land to development. Much of the land near North and South Stations is taken up by trackage, and the Rail Link, obviating the need for these stations (a couple of tracks to use in emergencies and for trains like the Lake Shore Limited might make sense, at South Station especially, although these trains could operate to West Station and provide connections there instead), and this would be very valuable land. In addition, it would render Boston Engine Terminal obsolete as maintenance would be for electric vehicles, and if maintenance facilities were rebuilt on less valuable land (say, in Billerica or next to the Anderson/Woburn station). Based on what Northpoint just sold for, it would be worth maybe half a billion dollars in development rights. A lot of this money could be captured to help pay for the rail link itself.

Will the North South Rail Link happen any time soon? Probably not. But hopefully this will help people understand its potential (which is huge!) and what we’re talking about when we talk about the NSRL.

Commuter Rail Ridership and Fares

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A Twitterer recently found a 1972 plan for transit-level service along many of Boston’s rail corridors and was floored that ridership on what we now know as Commuter Rail at that time was only 16,000 per day (it was 80,000 in the ’40s and now hovers around 70,000). It has indeed grown, especially the South Side lines: in 1972, only 600 people rode the Worcester Line daily (the then-speedy Mass Pike having recently opened); many single Worcester Line trains now carry that many; the line has grown more than 15-fold over the past 40 years.

But the time of impressive growth is even more impressive: in 1981, ridership on Commuter Rail still hovered around 17,000. And then it began to grow. By 1990, it had more than doubled. And during the 1990s, it more than doubled again, so that by 2000 there were more than four times as many riders as there had been two decades before. Some of this is attributable to extensions after service cuts in the ‘70s, and new service on the Old Colony Lines. But a lot is due to the revitalization of downtown Boston following the growth of the 128 corridor, worsening traffic, and higher parking costs.

For 22 years, from 1981 to 2003, Commuter Rail traffic grew every year but one: 1991, after the collapse of the “Massachusetts Miracle.” But it took off again thereafter, peaking at 74,000 daily riders in 2003.

It hasn’t been that high since.

At first, flat ridership could be blamed on the early-2000s recession. But in the past 15 years, ridership has stagnated. If ridership growth had continued, linearly, at the 1981-2003 rate, it would be poised to cross the 100,000 threshold this year. Instead, the numbers of riders has barely budged, fluctuating up and down as the economy, traffic, and the price of gas has ebbed and flowed, none of them seeming to dramatically affect ridership.

Except for fares. Take a look at the chart. It certainly seems that, once fares started to rise dramatically, ridership flattened out. In the last fifteen years, commuter rail fares have gone up 250%, while they didn’t rise that much in the 20 previous years (despite higher inflation). Subway fares have risen as well, but the nominal amount the fares have risen is very different.

In the ’80s and ’90s, a ride on the T cost 60 or 85 cents (that’s a token, by the way) while Commuter Rail fares ranged from $1.75 to $3, rising to $2.25 to $4. The ratios were similar to today (the highest Commuter Rail fare about five times a subway fare), but the difference only $3. Now? The difference between a tap of a Charlie Card and a punch of a ticket is $8, which is a much greater difference.

There are two salient bits here. First, subway ridership, despite the same relative rise in fares, has seen dramatic increase in passenger counts in recent years, despite the increases in fares. At issue here is the fact that Commuter Rail and urban rail are different populations: Commuter Rail passengers have more options. Most own cars. If the cost of driving and parking is not much more than commuter rail—and parking and driving costs haven’t more than doubled in the past 10 years—they are more likely to abandon the rails and head for the highways. If the MBTA provided excellent rail service, with fast speeds and reliability, this would be less of an push factor. But with old equipment and slow track, it is.

The second piece is that outside of peak travel times, the train generally can’t compete with vehicles on travel time, and on weekends, on ease or cost of parking. And while many trains at rush hour are near capacity, there is plenty of capacity on off-peak and weekend trains. It’s possible that if the T offered off-peak savings—say, $2 off all fares beyond zone 1A, or half off, or something—they could drive enough additional ridership to cover the lost fare revenue, all the while taking cars off the road, which is good for everyone. As would having sensible, clockface midday schedules. And it might even help ridership trends.

It’s rather obvious that Commuter Rail ridership is more elastic than subway ridership: when fares go up, ridership might not go down, but previous trends level off. Since urban riders would cry foul if local fares rose faster than Commuter Rail fares (the subsidy per ride is higher for Commuter Rail riders, although the subsidy per mile is about even), increasing Commuter Rail ridership would require better service. Given the recent performance of the Commuter Rail, this may be a tall order. But it should be a goal.

Anecdotes in the Globe

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When I write a letter to the Globe—which happens relatively often, it turns out—I try to throw something more than a personal anecdote in. I figure they don’t want to hear my story in response to Joan Vennochi’s (hers: “I was in traffic and a bike passed me, therefore I hate bikes”), but want me to add something their readership might be interested in. So I pick out one of her more ridiculous points (“We need more parking spaces for cars and fewer for bikes so people can go shopping.”) and show why it’s folly.

Which is why a couple of recent letters to the Globe regarding the DMU plan are dismaying. They get the gist of the argument right, but they anecdotes they use seem to say “look at this transit system we have, it’s so bad that I can’t use it because _____.” Except the fill-in-the-blank of that blank is a single personal experience which is not really verifiable. (I, at least, cited a study.)

Here’s letter #1. Nathan Banfield from Concord writes about taking the train from Concord. “I can drive to Porter Square from my home for, at most, $4 in gas, the same trip costs twice as much by commuter rail while taking considerably longer.” Let’s examine this. Yes, it’s $4 in gas. Then what do you do when you get to Porter? You park—somewhere. Probably at a meter. That costs money. A garage? That costs more. And if you factor in only the cost of gas, yes, it’s probably cheaper to drive. I think the 55¢ per mile (or whatever it is these days) figure quoted for cost per mile is high (it figures in fixed costs like insurance and assumes you have an expensive—and more quickly depreciating—vehicle) but it’s certainly more than the cost of gas alone.

But, oh, Nathan. Taking the train takes considerably longer? You picked one of the commuter rail lines where that’s not actually the case! The drive from Concord to Porter takes 22 minutes. If there’s no traffic. The train? 27 for an express, 34 for a local. That’s longer, but not by too much. But what if you happen to drive Route 2, say, between 6 and 10 a.m., or 2 and 7 p.m.? All of the sudden the 27 minute train ride seems like a breeze since you might spend that long waiting through the lights at Alewife. Yes, frequencies should be better. And, yes, on weekends it’s probably faster to drive. But for commuters, the train is certainly faster than driving, especially along Route 2.

The award for taking a single experience and mistaking it for data, however, goes to letter #2. Sherry Alpert writes in from Canton. “I’ve been riding these trains for 30 years” (reminds me of this Seinfeld clip). Good for her—and she doesn’t even try to claim that the train is so much slowed than driving. So, on January 8, the train was an hour late, and she missed a class. Therefore, the trains are unreliable. That may be the case, but just one late train on January 8 does not mean the train is always late. And would you rather drive at rush hour from Canton to Boston? Because that’s always going to take an extra hour. Again, the sentiment that more reliable service is understandable, but stating that the system is unreliable because one train was an hour late is like saying “traffic is really bad because I got stuck in one traffic jam.” If you get stuck in a traffic jam every day, then, yes, traffic is bad. If you get stuck in one specific traffic jam because, let’s say a tractor trailer jackknifed, then traffic is not bad—there was an accident.

Now, if only there was somewhere to see the MBTA’s arrival data. Some sort of, I don’t know, monthly scorecard. Oh. Wait. The MBTA has a monthly scorecard. You know what doesn’t have this kind of monthly data? The highways. But no one is writing letters saying “it took an hour to drive 12 miles on 128 today.” Because, frankly, that’s not really noteworthy, except maybe on Twitter. Which is where complaints about your train being delayed belong, anyway. But not in the newspaper.

Massachusetts’ DMU plan could well provide better rail service

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Last year (oh, wait, in 2012—gosh) I wrote about the sorry state of affairs of the MBTA’s commuter rail system. Outside of rush hour, trains travel infrequently and on seemingly random schedules. Even in closer-in, denser areas, service is provided only every couple of hours. (Oh, yeah, and service is slow, too.) There is probably demand for better service but little supply, and it’s partially a cost issue: running full, 1000-passenger commuter trains (with poor acceleration) is a losing proposition when few seats are filled.

Enter the DMU. The diesel multiple unit, while sparsely used in the US, is a frequent sight abroad, providing service at times when a full trainset is not needed. They leverage the direct connections between town centers that exist along rail lines, allowing fast service to the city center without rolling empty cars through the midday and evening. The plan imagines several lines utilizing DMUs on rail segments inside 128—most of which do not have paralleling subway service:

 (The full report, which appears to have been scanned as a PDF, is here.)

If implemented, this would go a long way towards improving service on several underserved corridors. The Fairmount Line currently is served infreqently by full-length commuter trains, a complete mismatch of service. Lower capacity and better acceleration would provide a much better benefit there. The Worcester Line—which will soon have added service—provides very little service in Newton, the most densely-populated portion of the line (it is served by express buses, which crawl through traffic on the Turnpike). Better service to Lynn will provide some of what a far-costlier rapid transit connection would—faster and more frequent service to Boston, and service to Woburn will provide better connectivity north of Boston, as well as further reducing the run times for trains to Lowell, currently one of the faster trips in the system, and one which, if the state of New Hampshire pays, could be extended northwards to the granite state to provide an alternative for the traffic-choked I-93.

The most interesting piece here is the inclusion of the Grand Junction through Cambridge. This page would argue for a complete rebuild of this line, with grade separation and electrification, and its operation as a crosstown link between North Station, Cambridge and Allston, currently a serpentine trip by car, much less by transit. It also would provide better access to the fast-growing Cambridge area which is currently poorly-served by highways and at the whim of the over-capacity Red Line. Currently, commuting from west of Boston to Cambridge is a bit of a black hole; there is no good connection between the Worcester Line and Cambridge without going all the way to South Station and backtracking across the Red Line. The Grand Junction is an underutilized piece of infrastructure which could be put to very good use.

What really matters is how the MBTA decides to implement DMU service. (That is, if it can be funded and overcome local opposition; double-dipping Cambridge City Councilman and State Rep Tim Toomey helped to quash a plan to route some commuter service over the Grand Junction in 2010. Needless to say, he did not receive my vote in recent council elections). If it uses it as a cost-saving measure to run the same level of service with less equipment, it will simply maintain the status quo. For instance: there are only eight commuter rail trains from the stations in Newton to Boston daily. And the Fairmount Line has 60 minute headways with no evening or weekend service. Running the same level of service with different equipment would be a wasted opportunity (if a minor cost savings).

If the state provides faster and more frequent service to these lines, say, with 15 or 20 minute headways all day, it will come much closer to providing a transit level of service, and actually providing service to these communities. With new stations at Yawkey, near New Balance and the intermediate “West Station” the Worcester Line would provide better connections through an underserved portion of Boston and Newton (with frequent, timed shuttle service across the Grand Junction a dramatic bonus). And the Fairmount Line, which currently provides piss-poor service to one of the states most disadvantaged communities, could prove an economic lifeline, if only the trains ran more than hourly.

And if DMUs are successful, they could be implemented in other parts of the system. Why run a full trainset at off-peak hours from Newburyport to Boston when a transfer at Beverly would provide the same level of service? Perhaps instead of the hourly locomotive-hauled train from Boston to Lowell, half-hourly DMUs would double the service at a minimal additional cost. Perhaps DMUs could provide service further west of Worcester to Springfield and Amherst. Hopefully, the state sees DMUs as a tool, not as a cost-cutting measure. If they implement this service better than they photoshopped the map, they could dramatically improve travel in Massachusetts.

Failures in stock photography

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In relation to the 10-year transportation capital investment plan the state of Massachusetts just announced (more on that soon) I was poking around the New Hampshire plan to extend transit to Concord, potentially piggybacking on better infrastructure in Massachusetts.

As I was scrolling through, however, I found a set of images which might inadvertently show why Massachusetts really needs to improve its infrastructure. At the bottom of the seventh page of this document, there are three images of commuter rail in North America. Here they are:
Let’s go right-to-left. On the right, we see the Long Island Railroad, gliding through the snow in New York. On the rails. In the center, there’s Tri-Rail, complete with commuters walking towards their destinations. The train is, of course, on the track. And on the left, there’s the MBTA’s service, uh, derailed outside South Station! The image, which appears to be from this story from the Boston Herald, shows a minor derailment outside of South Station in 2008. Setting aside copyright issues (perhaps they bought the photo from a stock site), it certainly seems like there are plenty of images out there that, you know, don’t show the T running off the tracks.
Well, maybe the Keolis contract will result in fewer derailments.

Moving Bicycles, part deux

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Update: the train sold out in 12 hours.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about trainloads of bicycles. The Boston Globe has an article about the bike train, and it’s trending in their most viewed list. It should  be exciting; I’m hoping the line for tickets isn’t too long over at South Station (I’m headed over there later to buy my ticket).

Now, it’s entirely possible that fewer than 700 bicyclists will buy tickets, and there will be no mad rush or secondary market. It’s also possible the train will sell out. (I’m only buying one ticket, buying extras to make a profit seems a bit uncouth.) In that case, here is Ari’s Unofficial Guide (I’ve written other unofficial guides in the past) To Getting To Southborough If You Can’t Get On The Train. In order of feasibility:

  1. Take the 8:30 and bike out to Hopkinton from Framingham. It’s 7 miles from Framingham to Hopkinton, which is only 4 miles further than the ride from Southborough. The train gets in at 9:20, which gives you a good hour and a half to bike up the hill to the start. If you were really keen, you could bike out to Southborough (6.5 miles) and join the ride there. One caveat is that they may be somewhat reticent to put a bunch of bikes on this train, but since Framingham is the final stop getting all the bikes off won’t delay any other passengers. Just make sure to leave room for the “normals” on the train. Need to kill an hour? There’s a bar in Ashland right on the course. Hopkinton isn’t dry, but there don’t seem to be many bars there. Update: The MBCR tweeted that it is a “regular train with room for only a few bikes.” So if you take it, arrive early, board early, and then get ready to get off quickly in Framingham. This train turns and is the 9:45 back to Boston, so it can’t stand to get delayed by an hour. Make sure to leave a couple of cars bike-free for non-cyclists. And consider buying a higher-zone pass to give the T some extra dollar bills.
  2. Take the 9:20 to Franklin. At 13.1 miles, this is a longer ride than the Framingham option, but it does leave a bit later. The train gets in to Franklin at 10:12, more than half an hour before the extra train gets to Southborough. From there it’s a ride mostly along back roads with one big hill at the end in to Hopkinton (the ride from Norfolk, the stop before Franklin, is not much longer, and you get an extra 7 minutes to ride). It’s probably a very nice ride, but you should be able to ride it in an hour to meet the rest of the gang from the Extra. Assuming a 45 minute run time, the Extra will arrive at 10:45 and should be done unloading by 11:15, and it’s a 15 minute-or-so ride to the start from there. If you can ride 12 m.p.h. you should be able to get to the start around the same time. (i.e. don’t try to do this on a Hubway, but if you’re a roadie, you should be fine.) See the suggestions above to keep the train, and yourself, on schedule.
  3. Just get on your bike and ride! Who’s not up for a metric century in the dark, anyway? You could trace Paul Revere’s footsteps (that’s what the holiday is all about—it’s not just a random day off for government workers) and ride up the Minuteman to Lexington and on to Concord. (This is more like 70 miles, and more if you follow Paul Revere’s route through Charlestown and Medford.) Then drop south to Cortaville/Southborough, meet the train, and ride on.
  4. Play coy, catch the 11:00 to Framingham and ride from there. For this option, get on the 11:00 train and buy a ticket to Framingham. Tell the conductor that you live there and are riding home, and that is within the bike regulations of the T. The train gets in to Framingham at 11:50, so you would have plenty of time to detrain and bike backwards on the course to go and meet the rest of the ride (or just hang out in Framingham; the first riders will shoot down the early hills in 15 minutes easily). You wouldn’t get the full experience, but it would work, in a pinch. Major caveat: even if you cite policy, they might not let you on this train.
  5. Play coy and try to catch the 11:00 to Southborough. (Not Suggested) Word on the street is that bikes won’t be allowed on the late train. There’s a canard that it will be full from Red Sox traffic from the game which starts at 1:00; I don’t believe this. But they don’t want a ton of bikes clogging the train and slowing it down; that’s why they’re running the extra. Still, it might work as an option, but I wouldn’t suggest it. If you were to take it, you’d arrive at midnight, and have a tough time getting to Hopkinton by the start, although you could probably catch some stragglers. If you are going to do this, I’d suggest buying a ticket to Worcester, claiming that’s your final destination, and getting off at Southborough. Unless there’s no one else getting off there. Have fun biking home from Worcester. (Actually, this train turns in Worcester and runs back to South Station, so you’d get a nice, dark train ride. Fun!) Anyway, don’t do this.
Whatever you do, be sure to express gratitude towards the MBCR employees—who are mostly volunteering for the event!—and the T in general. And ride safe.

How do you move 1000 bicyclists by train?

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This seems like it should be a rhetorical question. It’s not.

In 2010, about 70 bicyclists got onboard the late train to Worcester at 11:00, biked to the start of the Boston Marathon at midnight, and rode back in to the city. In 2011, 250 bikers showed up. Last year, by most estimations, 750 bicyclists made the trip, 150 on an early twilight ride and 600 on the traditional midnight ride.

If history is any guide—if the event triples again in size—2000 bicyclists will attempt to cram aboard the train and get 25 miles west to Hopkinton. Even if the growth of the event slows, a good 1000 bicyclists will likely show up to the event. (It is being advertised as “limited space” right now—we’ll see what happens.) The issue here is that with 600 bicyclists last year, the MBTA (well, really the MBCR, which operates commuter rail service) had to couple two trains together with 14 cars in order to accommodate these travelers. Any significant increase will have to have advanced planning, or some riders will get left behind.

While no one will lose their job if they can’t fit on the train (i.e. no one is missing work due to an overcrowded train), it would be lost revenue for the T, and bad publicity. The event garners some news coverage and probably will continue to do so, and if these cyclists are unable to cram aboard the Midnight Marathon train they’re less likely to take their bikes aboard trains the rest of the summer, and genrally at off-peak times. This is discretionary ridership which adds revenue without adding operating costs (or crowding rush hour trains). It’s in the T’s best interest to make sure everyone gets onboard and happy.

The problem is that unless changes are made, the train is nearly maxed out. So, there need to be some strategies to maximize the number of cyclists per train, streamline boarding and detraining, and have enough room to get everyone to Southborough, and staging them not in an intersection. Oh, and garner enough revenue for the MBTA that it is worthwhile to run extra trains to accommodate these passengers.

Maximizing cyclists on each train. Last year, when lines of cyclists snaked through South Station and on to the platforms, there were few guidelines to maximizing the number of bikes on board. The T ran single-level coaches (so cyclists didn’t have to haul bikes up and down stairs—this is probably for the best) with, for the most part 2-3 seating. For the most part, bikes were set in to the three-seat side of the car, and people sat in the couplets. This meant that, for all intents and purposes, 40% of the seats on the train were occupied.

This can be improved. With a minimal bit of cajoling, three bikes can be fit in each row. This means that every six rows of seats can see 15 bikes and 15 passengers. How? The first row has three bikes and two seats, so there’s a leftover passenger. The second row has three bikes and two seats, so there are now two leftover passengers. This goes on until you get to the sixth row which has five extra passengers and, very conveniently, five seats. Fill those up and start from scratch. You’ve raised capacity from 40% to 50%. With a seven car train and 120 seats per car, you can now accommodate 420 passengers.

How do you assure that there are three bikes per seat? Get volunteer riders-turned-ushers to enforce these rules. Have them walk down the cars from either end and assure there are three bikes to a seat and nothing goes empty. This doesn’t have to fall on T employees (who were mostly amazed at the turnout last year); I’m sure a couple dozen volunteers could be marshalled in to showing up at 8 to make sure everyone gets on the train. I’d probably be one.

Streamline boarding and detraining. Boarding is relatively simple at South Station. It’s time consuming, but with wide, level platforms it is relatively easy. The goal should be to get people on the train early, and board multiple cars at once. Last year people seemed to board one car until it was full and then move to the next. If we know how many bikes can fit in each car (and we should, see above) we can shepherd carloads of cyclists down the platform to the further-down cars and have everyone board at the same time.

Last year was that the extra train called in didn’t arrive until after 10, and people spent a while waiting (although the service did leave on time). If there are multiple trains, when a train is full, it should go. Last year the train had to be staged—detrained in sections—which more than doubled the time it sat at the station. In fact, here’s an idea. The 11:00 train makes all stops to Southborough. It should be boarded full except for one car, which can be reserved for “normal” passengers, and leave at 11:00 and make all stops. A second special train could begin boarding a bit later—say, at 11:00—and make an express run to Southborough (in about 35 minutes). It could cross over at some point and detrain on the inbound track (since it would then turn back to Boston) at the same time as the first train, doubling the speed people can get off. If there was a need for three trains, an early express could make a run out to Southborough and clear the tracks before the later trains arrived. It’s not like there is a lot of traffic on the line on Sunday evenings, so all of this would be possible.

In fact, there is a large parking lot on the inbound side, which would be a better place to assemble than last year when cyclists took over the streets (not that there was much traffic).

Sell and collect tickets. This worked well last year, for the most part. One change is that this year many participants may use smart phones to buy their tickets, and a question is whether there would be an issue with checking these tickets en masse. A certain suggestion would be to cordon off the platform at boarding time, and check tickets before boarding, so conductors wouldn’t have to ply the coaches en route.

Finally, it might be advisable to suggest that Midnight Marathoners buy a higher-zoned ticket to help the T cover the costs of this train. If the ride organizers told everyone to buy a Zone 8 one-way ticket, it would only be a dollar or two more for each rider, but it would be a few thousand extra for the cash-strapped T. Furthermore, requesting that riders buy a specific ticket ahead of time (Zone 9, for instance, which otherwise serves only the TF Green airport) could give a pretty good read on expected turnout. They are doing a tremendous service to the community by running extra-long trains, or extra sections, and putting a little extra money—which most anyone riding their bike at midnight on Marathon Monday can afford—in their coffers is good for all.

The cost of doing nothing

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The worst traffic in New England is on I-93, going north and south into and out of Boston. When highways were canceled in 1970s and money put towards transit, I-93 was left doing the duty of two highways south of the city (since the Southwest Corridor was nixed) and four to the north (where Routes 2 and 3 were meant to access the city via Cambridge, and Route 95 was to be routed over the Northeast Expressway). The phrase that comes to mind is “three quarts of [something] in to a two quart pail.” There is simply not the roadway capacity to handle the traffic on this road in the morning or evening, there are choke points at other interchanges, and as a result traffic is backed up for several hours each morning and evening, turning a 60 minute drive from Manchester to Boston in to a two- to three-hour ordeal.

The corridor from Concord, N.H. to Boston has frequent bus service, but these buses sit in the same traffic as everybody else until a short carpool lane just to the north of Boston. There is no rail service beyond Lawrence and Lowell, meaning that alternatives to driving require many motorists to travel I-93 to some extent. New Hampshire is spending $800 million to widen its section of the road, and is leaving space for future rail transit and building bus park-and-ride facilities. However, under the previous Republican administration, the state refused to study rail transit service. That vote was reversed recently, and New Hampshire will commission a study of rail service north of the border. *

As usual, opponents come out of the woodwork whenever transportation dollars are slated to be spent on anything other than King Car. “Where are you going to find a few million dollars?” they exclaim, “When you just spent a billion on widening a roadway!” It’s a waste of taxpayer dollars! A boondoggle! It will never pay for itself!

Tell me, again, who is paying the billion dollars to widen 93? Oh, wait, that is a necessary public investment.

There are several salient issues here:

  • Widening the roadway in New Hampshire makes some empirical sense, and going northbound will eliminate a traffic-knotting lane drop at the border. However, the bigger issues have to do with infrastructure further south in Massachusetts not being able to handle more cars from the north. So widening the roadway will not aid many travelers, and may in fact make overall traffic worse where people want to go.
  • I-93 would be a good candidate for a proper HOV, or perhaps HOV/Toll lane, which would aid bus traffic and encourage carpooling, and given the number of buses on I-93 would benefit a high number of road users.
  • In regards to rail, and to echo a frequent sentiment at the California High Speed Rail Blog, the cost of doing nothing is not zero. In other words, if there are no changes made to transportation between New Hampshire and Boston, there are significant costs which New Hampshire will incur. We’ve already seen that the cost of widening I-93 in New Hampshire is nearly $1 billion. What are the costs of poor access to the Boston job market for New Hampshire residents? Of lower property values because of decreased demand due to this limited access? Of time spent in cars in traffic for hours per day? Of tourists who don’t take a weekend trip because of traffic on Friday evening?
First, how widening in New Hampshire doesn’t help traffic down south, or the three quarts in a two quart pail issue. New Hampshire can widen I-93 within its borders all it wants, but driving solely I-93 in New Hampshire gets you from nowhere to nowhere. No offense meant—there are not the major, growing job centers in Southern New Hampshire as there are in Massachusetts. Much of the traffic on I-93 is destined for offices along 495 and 128 in the Bay State, or further south in Boston. Adding space on this section of I-93 will ease some congestion in the state, but it will only lead to more cars traveling southwards in to an existing wall of traffic. The utility of the road for everyone, but especially for New Hampshire commuters, is not enhanced by this project.
Every morning, from 6 a.m. until 9, 10 or even 11, traffic on I-93 grinds to a halt. It first slows in Lawrence, where traffic backing up off of I-495 can slow the commute. Even as the roadway widens from three lanes to four, traffic slows south of 495 as it approaches the wholly inadequate interchange at 128, where traffic backs up off the mainline and through the tight cloverleaf. From there, traffic sometimes eases through the Middlesex Fells, but the roadway then narrows from four lanes to three, one of which is a carpool-only lane. Although traffic no longer backs up off of the Central Artery (which cost, ahem, $15 billion to replace), it’s sufficiently squeezed down that there are only so many cars which can find their way in to the downtown tunnel. Mitigating the 128 interchange is no easy task and will probably cost on the order of $200 million or more. Adding capacity to the roadway through Somerville is a non-starter, and this squeeze will probably never be expanded.
There is a way to increase the utility of the highway without widening it, which is to change the demand model for the roadway by introducing an HOV facility. Right now, there is a 2.5 mile long carpool lane on the southbound side of the roadway from Medford to Boston. This saves carpoolers, and buses, a few minutes on their morning commute, since the lane starts before the Somerville lane drop. However, it is otherwise inadequate in several manners. It provides no access to the Storrow Drive off ramp, which serves major employment centers in Boston and Cambridge. It also reintegrates traffic on to the Central Artery where it has to merge across several lanes to exit. Most importantly, however, it starts far too far south, and during peak hours the traffic jam starts far before the lane becomes available. Oh, right: there’s no HOV lane going northbound.
I-93 is the most heavily-traveled interstate bus corridor in to Boston of any length. Between 7 and 10 each morning, 27 buses travel from 495 to Boston (mostly private carriers from Hanover, Concord, Manchester, Nashua and Andover, Mass.). Another 21—Logan Express and MBTA—enter at or near 128, and 21 more MBTA buses enter the roadway in Medford. Most of these buses sit in traffic with everyone else. Once they access the carpool lane, and assuming they are operating at or near capacity, they transport 3500 people—about 1200 per hour, even though there is only a bus every three minutes. The capacity of a lane full of single occupancy vehicles is only about 1800, and in heavy traffic, it’s less. A better facility might also see buses coming down I-95 shift to 495 and 93 to avoid traffic on Route 1 as well, and encourage more people to ride.
And these are the statistics without any major benefits for ridership. These buses cope with the same traffic as everybody else in the morning and in the evening. Their operators are hamstrung by unpredictable traffic conditions which can cause schedules to run an hour late, or more. And there is no real time savings for riders. There is definitely a cost benefit versus driving, but the buses can’t go any faster than cars on their own. However, an HOV lane the full length of I-93 in Massachusetts would dramatically improve these commutes. It could be built for minimal cost by cannibalizing a lane off the current roadway. It would only require infrequent entrances, and exits before Boston would have to be minimized to preclude the possibility of the mainline backing up in to the HOV lane. It would allow buses to standardize schedules, and attract new ridership based on time savings—many of whom would otherwise be on their own in cars on the road. 
An HOV lane would also attract carpoolers, and to keep the traffic flowing a minimum of three passengers might be feasible during high demand times. This might encourage slugging from these far-flung park-and-rides in to the city. If the time savings were high enough—and at times avoiding traffic on I-93 can save an hour or more—many single-drivers would be keen to grab a couple of new friends for the ride.
Finally, this project could be paid for by tolling the carpool lane depending on the traffic conditions. At certain times of day, allowing single drivers to travel the length of the lane for $10 or more would raise significant revenue and allow those who wanted to avoid traffic to do so. While often derided as “Lexus Lanes” such a system would be optimized first for traffic conditions and then for revenue. If the HOV facility was near capacity from carpools and buses alone, the price could be astronomical. If the rest of the road was mostly free-flowing, it would be low enough to entice a few drivers to save a few minutes without breaking the bank. And revenue from this lane could go to paying for the initial improvements, as well as funding parallel transit options.
Finally, The Cost of Doing Nothing Is Not Zero. Basically, inaction on transit in this corridor will have negative repercussions throughout the region. Quashing a study because rail will require a subsidy (as opposed to $800 million highway widening projects, which apparently pay for themselves) is as bad policy as it is politics. Rail service would provide access to jobs in Boston from New Hampshire, but also access to job sites in New Hampshire from Boston. In theory, rail service would run express from Boston to Lowell in 40 minutes or less, and then provide access to the Spit Brook Road area, Downtown Nashua, Manchester Airport, Downtown Manchester and Concord. With gas prices poised again to break $4 per gallon, precluding access except by car—even to dense, downtown areas—is a good way to stagnate long-term growth.
New Hampshire has to realize that most of its population lives within the “commute-shed” of downtown Boston, and it is inextricably linked to the larger city to the south, even as it derides it with shouts of Taxachusetts and worse. If New Hampshire’s goal is to provide better access on I-93—and it seems that it is—it has to have some sort of alternative from Massachusetts to actually improve the access that I-93 provides. Whether this is a high occupancy facility or rail transit—or some other mode—is a valid question. Whether it should be studied, however, is not.

( * It should be noted that while the Amtrak Downeaster services has several stops in New Hampshire, it is funded solely by the State of Maine. New Hampshire benefits dramatically from the service, which transports hundreds of Granite Staters to Boston every day.)

Philly vs Melbourne

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A quick follow-on to my previous post on clock face scheduling. I mentioned the commuter rail system in Melbourne, Australia. It’s being rebranded as a Metro system with service levels to match. Even the longest branch line has midday service at least every 30 minutes, and most of the system has service every 20, 15 or 10 minutes, with clock face scheduling at all times.

Melbourne has 231 miles of electrified route, and serves about 700,000 passengers daily. That’s more than any commuter rail system in the US outside New York City (where three systems combine with about a million riders), more than double Chicago (a city with a population more than double Melbourne) and five times the ridership of Philadelphia and Boston.

The Melbourne rail map, with the Philadelphia Regional Rail lines
flipped, rotated and overlaid (in red). Center City Philadelphia is centered
on the Melbourne CBD. In this map, the NEC runs northwest-southeast
and the Main Line runs east-southeast. Finding GIS data for Philadelphia
was simple, finding it for Melbourne’s rail lines much harder. Also note:
Purple lines on the Melbourne map are not electrified and thus not
counted in the track mileage here; Philly’s non-electric line, namely
the NJT-operated Atlantic City Line, is not shown.

Why compare Melbourne and Philadelphia? Both operate almost solely electric trains. They have nearly the same track length (about 221 miles for Philadelphia; Boston has almost double the track length with not much more ridership). And, most importantly, both linked two separate commuter systems with downtown tunnels in the 1970s and 1980s to improve efficiency in their systems.

Now, while it’s not apples to apples, it’s not apples to oranges. Both systems have about 1 million daily riders on their non-regional rail systems (270m in Melbourne, 290m in Philadelphia). Melbourne lacks any heavy rail subway, but has an extensive tram network; Philadelphia has heavy rail, light rail, streetcars and buses, with the buses carrying slightly more than half the load. Both cities have populations in the neighborhood of 5 million. Melbourne is much more isolated (Philly is less than two hours from New York, Baltimore and DC, Melbourne is that far from Geelong, Bendigo and Ballarat) but both have extensive, car-centered suburbs.

Both systems saw ridership bottom out in the early 1980s and have doubled (in the case of Philadelphia, tripled, although the low occurred after hundreds of miles of diesel service was scrapped and a crippling strike severely cut ridership) since. Both run under overhead wires. Both have quadruple-tracking on some core segments.

And Melbourne’s regional rail system carries more than five times as many passengers as Philadelphia’s.

There are a bunch of reasons why this is the case. Two of the biggest: Frequency is certainly one—Melbourne has more commuter rail lines with 30-minute-or-better headways all day than there are in the entire United States (*)—only two SEPTA lines operate more-than-hourly. Melbourne’s two-zone fare structure, with full integration with bus and tram lines (this is the subject of another post entirely), also makes it much easier to use the system.

It would be a very interesting exercise to see if running SEPTA with Melburnian service levels and a simplified fare structure dramatically increased ridership—especially if someone has $100m burning a hole in their pocket.

* Actually, Melbourne has 11 full lines with at-least 20 minute headways and two others with 15 minute headways before branches split near their termini and have service every half hour. This is more than the 9 lines in the US which have 30 minute service patterns. BART and Washington Metro’s outlying branches could be seen as a similar system to Melbourne’s, but they were built in the ’70s; most lines in Melbourne were built in the 1800s.